Soft power, hard results — and a lesson for Trump, if he’s listening

As we wait to see which option a deeply confused White House will embrace in its nuclear shoving match with North Korea, Canada offers a compelling example of what soft power can achieve.

This week, Hyeon Soo Lim was released from prison by the North Koreans on “sick bail”. The Christian pastor was, according to Pyongyang, arrested in 2015 “while being involved in a thrice-cursed subversion plot” to undermine the government of Kim Jong Un. That transgression of North Korea’s medieval law earned him a life sentence at hard labour in the Hermit Kingdom.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intervened and objected, North Korea afforded him the usual tongue-lashing. Canadians were “spouting rubbish against the DPRK.” Canadians were “unreasonable and uncouth.” Instead of dissing North Korea, Canada should have “apologized” for its citizen’s egregious offence.

Trudeau could have jabbed back. He could have said that North Korea was being run by a dictator in training pants, a misguided, vicious child trying to ape the dubious accomplishments of his autocratic father and grandfather. He could have asked what else one could expect from someone who has his own people executed with an anti-aircraft gun. He could have said Kim was a madman with whom Canada would have nothing to do unless Lim was released on our terms. But he didn’t.

Instead, Trudeau went about the business of securing Lim’s release quietly. The PM employed his national security adviser, Daniel Jean. The Canadian group that went to work on the task teamed up with the Swedish diplomatic mission inside North Korea, where only 24 countries have embassies. Canada is not one of them.

Sweden functions as a ‘protective power’ for Canada in North Korea; in other words, it assumes consular responsibilities there for our citizens, like Lim.

Lim’s release shows that diplomacy works. It also shows a couple of other things about the North Koreans. Despite their purple-prose press releases — reminiscent of the comical whoppers told by Saddam’s information minister, ‘Baghdad Bob’ — there is a back channel to Kim Jong Un worth pursuing.

Lim is a free man mainly because his government avoided the temptation to get into a war of words. Ottawa refused to set pre-conditions for Lim’s release — conditions that Pyongyang never would have agreed to anyway, for propaganda reasons. It was a strategy that demanded great patience — waiting until the right circumstances emerged for both sides to hold their heads up after a happy resolution of this dismal affair.

Contrast the Canadian approach to North Korea to the Mad Hatter strategy embraced by the Trump regime: The president says one thing, the U.S. ambassador to the UN says another, the secretary of state says something else entirely. Some have called it the ‘good cop, bad cop’ approach. Looks more like the Keystone Cops.

Consider Trump’s schoolyard notion of what it means to work with other countries to defuse crisis situations. This president (whose only real connection to things Chinese before entering politics came in take-out containers) thinks presidents tell other countries what to do, then blame them for creating the problems in the first place, as Trump has blamed the Chinese.

How would Beijing respond to a Trumpian nuclear strike, or even a conventional one, on its borders — especially given how that almost certainly would trigger a vast refugee influx from North Korea into China?

And did I mention the president expects results in two weeks? Trump is not a bull in the china shop of diplomacy. He’s a brontosaurus.

Some people still confuse his trash-talk with toughness. But where has Trump’s impulsive threat to overwhelm North Korea with “fire and fury” and “destroy” its people left the world? Inching up on the point of no return, that’s where. (Remember, this is the guy who asked on national television why the U.S. built nuclear weapons if it couldn’t use them.)

Thanks to Trump’s colicky outburst, Pyongyang has announced plans to fire four ballistic missiles into the ocean 30 or 40 kilometres from Guam, home to 160,000 Americans. Trump’s idea of diplomacy is to threaten to punch the other guy twice as hard as he can punch you. Turns out that Pyongyang can play that game, too.

Now that Kim has thrown down the gauntlet, the only question is whether Trump presses the re-set button or the launch button. The world hasn’t had to worry seriously about a nuclear exchange since teachers back in the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis were telling us to hide under our desks if Khrushchev paid a visit on the business end of an ICBM.

And those who seek comfort in the fact that the U.S. has the firepower to wipe North Korea off the map need to review their geography. Seoul is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the world — home to 25.6 million people. It also has 15,000 artillery pieces and rocket launchers trained on it. And it is just 35 miles from North Korea.

Then there’s Tokyo. It’s the world’s largest urban conglomerate, with 37.8 million people in its greater metropolitan area. North Korea has shown in recent missile tests that the Japanese capital is within easy range of fire.

The real elephant in the room is China, the world’s other superpower, also armed with nukes. How would Beijing respond to a Trumpian nuclear strike, or even a conventional one, on its borders — especially given how that almost certainly would trigger a vast refugee influx from North Korea into China?

Russia also shares a small border with North Korea, 17 kilometres on land and 12 nautical miles at sea. There is no guarantee that if the U.S. exercises the military option against North Korea, it wouldn’t lead to a wider, and far more devastating, regional war.

Even if that doesn’t happen — even if the U.S. crushed Kim Jong Un and destroyed his people — it wouldn’t be long before vast numbers of civilians were dying in the crossfire in South Korea — including, in all likelihood, the roughly 30,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Demilitarized Zone, closest to Kim’s artillery and rockets.

There is a better way for the United States to proceed than elbowing the world toward Armageddon. Trump didn’t notice it, but Canada recently celebrated National Peacekeeper’s Day. There was a lot to celebrate.

This country invented UN peacekeeping. Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize for preventing the Suez Crisis from turning into a wider regional war in the Middle East. Though this is less well-known, Pearson also kept Canada out of the Vietnam War (just as Jean Chrétien kept this country out of the disastrous Iraq War that Stephen Harper was so anxious to fight).

But perhaps the person Trump could learn the most from when it comes to avoiding violent solutions is General Jean de Chastelain, a former Canadian chief of the defence staff and the man who helped broker peace between the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defence Force in Northern Ireland.

As it happened, I was attending school in Dublin during one of the deadlier phases of the battle between the IRA and the UDF. Back then, the conventional wisdom was that there was no bridge to peace in the seemingly endless cycle of sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants.

But through two years of patience and diplomacy, de Chastelain and others came up with a plan to put an end to the Troubles — the so-called Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The deal was strongly endorsed in referenda held in the 26-county Republic of Ireland and the six counties of Northern Ireland. Where guns and bombs had failed, diplomats succeeded — through faith, hard work and goodwill.

It’s not about red lines, Mr. President. It’s about open lines.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Michael Harris is a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His nine books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry and three of his books have been made into movies. His book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, was a number one best-seller.